"I'm writing to inform you that the release team discussed Drop or Fix Fallback Mode yesterday. We've come to the conclusion that we can't maintain fallback mode in reasonable quality, and are better off dropping it." Gnome-fallback has been my refuge, as I find both Unity and Gnome 3's shell unusable. Yes, we have been warned this would happen. I thought the cost of maintaining gnome-panel would be so low that it might never need to happen. But as it appears, it is deemed necessary. As for me, I'm bound for something Qt, as I am very angry at Gnome for abandoning its 'classic' users.

They don't measure up the consequences of Unity yet. There is a lot of people still running old versions [...] Unity based Ubuntu will be the smallest slice.

Do you have any data supporting that? That's how it works, if you put forward some hypothesis - not just writing "obviously" and such.

And if you'd at least look at those Wikimedia stats, you'd see that there is some data there WRT Ubuntu point releases - 3 of them listed, 12.04 two times (x86 and amd64) at 129M in total (that is already mroe than all other distros combined), and the only pre-Unity that has enough to be listed is 10.4 (LTS, I guess) at 50M.

Plus, you'd have to explain why Ubuntu registered such relatively massive growth in the years when it came default with Unity (and why other distros clearly lost hits in the same time, hmm...)

BTW, a disclosure: I don't even use Unity, don't really care for it one way or the other (but, as far personal anecdotes go: I have around some people which use it, and clearly like it)

Your data is coming from one place, and it's not fragmented. You would need more sources to support the claim that Ubuntu + Unity releases have grown. Market share is something hard to measure and it is necessary that you find more sources. According to other sources, Wikimedia is wrong.